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You Should Be Using These Apps On Your Phone

Smartphone as a work assistant

Our phones have gone from blocky, awkward devices to sleek, thin machines. It is now 2017, and processing power in smartphones (even in budget ones) have overcome the performance of some computers just ten years ago.

With the modern smartphone now more of a pocket computer than a communication device, several apps have been made to make work easier. These apps, when used with a bit of creativity and time, can help you stay on top of your goals, never miss an important piece of info, track everything that matters to you and increase mental focus.

Read on to find out how you can transform your phone from a typical communications device to an indispensable work and life assistant.

1. Note-taking

Text

Take notes with your phone rather than on a piece of paper. Unlike paper, you won’t lose digital notes if you have them backed up to the cloud. Moreover, you can take hundreds of notes with you on your phone without needing to carry thick notebooks everywhere you go.

Most note-taking apps are searchable, like a web browser. Retrieve your information quickly and easily, whenever you need it. On Android, the best note-taking app is Google Keep. Keep allows your to color-code your notes to your fancy. Add them to your home screen as a widget for quick access. You can still view your notes on any computer with an internet connection. Simply go over to the Google Keep site, log in with your Google account, and browse through your notes.

On iOS, we recommend the default Notes app. It’s beautifully designed, clean, and robust. Write notes on the fly, and format your text in bold, italics, or underlined. Much like Google Keep, you can attach photos on to your notes. You can also organize them in folders, for easy retrieval.

Bonus tip: You can create a note with your voice! Activate Siri by long-pressing the home button, and say “Make a note“. Siri will ask you what to write about, and it will write whatever you just said.

Scan documents

What if you had access to all the paper receipts, documents, letters, and notes; any time, anywhere? You can! Your smartphone has a camera. The best scanner is the scanner you always have with you!

Simply point your phone towards a paper document and take a photo. Make sure you adjust the focus a bit so text is clear on your phone’s screen. Then, simply create a photo album in your phone’s photos gallery, label it SCANS and move the photos of your documents there.

Evernote (iOS, Android) is a multi-platform note-taking app that has a really cool scanning function. When you scan documents with Evernote, the app will brighten the document, making it seem like it was really scanned using a proper scanner. In dark environments, the app will automatically activate your phone’s flash to brighten up the image. Even when taking scans of the document at an angle, Evernote will modify the image to make it seem like you took it straight down!

2. Scheduling

Calendar

Schedule events or tasks that you can’t do today. Any calendar app works well; but we recommend Google Calendar (iOS, Android). It has natural language text-parsing, meaning you simply type your event into the app like how you’d say it. For example, typing:

Midwifery refresher seminar 8pm Sunday at UMMC

Will add a calendar entry Midwifery refresher seminar, dated on Sunday at 8PM, and location at UMMC. The app can take the information of the location of the event from Google Maps. So on that day, it notifies you what time you should leave to arrive on time!

3. Reading

Books

Why bring your whole bookshelf when you can just carry your phone with you? Many textbook publishers also offer ebook versions of their textbooks. With an ebook reader app, you can read books you’ve saved on your phone. Now you can refer your favorite 900-page physiology textbook anywhere without needing to break your back.

The Kindle (iOS,Android) app allows you to buy ebooks from Amazon and you can read them anytime you like. Check out their selection of nursing textbooks that you can get cheaper than the physical copies. Even if you delete the ebooks off your phone, you can still re-download them from Kindle.

3. Task Management

Todoist (iOS, Android)

Putting tasks out of your head and into a system that you trust is one of the best ways to prevent information overload. This enables you to have less mental distractions as you only focus on the task you are currently doing, rather than having other future tasks nagging in your mind.

Using task management apps can seem complicated, but it actually is not. The end goal is to spend less time doing the things you want to do, so that you have more time to do the things you want to do.

Having a to-do list makes it easy for you to see what you have right now, and what actions are up next. Todoist is a great app for this. It’s available on all platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, and Chrome.

Start by listing down tasks in your Inbox. As your task list grows, you might start to see some tasks are related to each other. Create projects in Todoist to group these tasks and sort them.

Some tasks are more complicated than other tasks. You can break down these tasks into a series of sub-tasks, allowing you to focus on tackling one thing at a time in pursuit of a larger goal. Remember, to eat an elephant, you need to take one bite at a time.

Also, just like Google Calendar, Todoist accepts natural language input; set tasks to recur daily, monthly, every two weeks, or even something complicated such as “Every third Saturday of the month“. Todoist will understand you. See here for the complete guide.

Todoist is free to use, but with a small subscription fee, premium features such as location-based reminders, file attachments, and tagging are unlocked.

The modern smartphone is a great tool for self-improvement, organization, and productivity. In such a small device, you can read books, take notes, and stay on top of your work any time, any day. As nurses’ work become more and more complex, we need better tools to help us keep track of daily life. Hopefully you have gained insight into using this great tool, and help you take on challenges that will advance your career as a nurse.

Head over to MIMS Career and discover our wide range of nurse jobs. All of our pages are mobile-responsive; browse jobs, sign up, and apply are all doable on your smartphone. Make your next career move, with MIMS Career.

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